


the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Post-Emily, mildly AU i guess? i dont know folks, season 5, uhhhh...some weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 06:51:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11248560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: In layman's terms, he supposes they're sleeping together. The layman has never been much of a romantic.





	the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake

  
“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake  
and dress them in warm clothes again.  
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running  
until they forget that they are horses.  
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,  
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,  
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days  
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple  
to slice into pieces.  
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means  
we're inconsolable.  
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.  
These, our bodies, possessed by light.  
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

\- Richard Siken,  _SCHEHERAZADE_

* * *

  
  
It’s been dark for a long time now. Mulder touches two fingers to her cheek. She wakes up for him, rubs her eyes and blinks.  
  
Scully grew up a Navy brat, got good at sleeping in unfamiliar places. Now the backseat of a car. Now a San Diego motel, the creaking sway of an old yellow bed. Now a new bedroom with the humidity-peeled white paint and the window panes that click when the wind blows off the ocean. She grew up a Navy brat with three siblings, got good at sleeping in unfamiliar places amongst elbows and knees, amongst hushing and sweat-sticky skin smelling of sunscreen under starchy sheets. Her sister’s pillow-muffled laughter.  
  
He asks how on earth she can fall asleep like that, snaps his fingers fast. She doesn’t tell him about Melissa’s tendency to hum in her sleep or Charlie’s way of kicking her right above the ankle. She does not tell him about new house smell in California or her mother’s habit of pace, pace, pacing until the shiny wood floor in the paint-air living room was scuffed where her heel had kissed it.  
  
She shrugs. “I just do. It’s not a skill. Sleep is purely biological, Mulder. We learn it before we’re born.”  
  
“Insomniacs are not born,” he counters, stretching as they walk from the car to an All-Night (in bright pink lights) diner across the lot. “They’re made.”  
  
They’ve been swapping stake-out shifts with another pair of agents on and off for three nights now. She slept while Mulder kept an eye out, played late night talk radio low and cracked sunflower seeds in the silence. When it was her turn to keep watch, she’d made him sit in the passenger seat and demanded he shut his eyes. He was, she’d said, worse than her godson and there was a reason she didn’t babysit anymore.  
  
Tell me a bedtime story, he’d tried, his voice all fake pout and real exhaustion.  
  
She’d shaken her head, and he’d sighed next to her. Clenched and unclenched his hand like a predisposed animal stretching against his thigh for the next four hours. In his head, with his eyes closed, he’d tried to alphabetize and organize all the words he knew for “dreams.”  
  
“Maybe you could teach me sometime,” he says, holding the glass door open so she can duck in and around him.  
  
She quirks her mouth in a way that manages to be both mocking and earnest. The diner glows like a night light.  
  
\--  
  
Since San Diego, he’s been spending a lot of time not sleeping. A lot of time thinking about doll-eyed little girls and skinned knee boys and the weight of Scully’s fever-warm daughter across his chest.  
  
If he’s honest, it started before that. Before Florida, even. After Bill and Maggie and Skinner and the priest had all left the room in a bustling, confused mass of prayer and benediction, Scully had slept long hours in her hospital bed. As she’d left the room, her mother had caught his shoulder in her navy-wife grip and suggested he go get some rest in the same firm, no nonsense way Scully liked to use to suggest his theories were wrong. He’d gone home and slept in half-hour bursts. Patterns of oblivion broken up by the imagined ringing of the phone. It was rare that he felt unable to tell dream from reality. He wondered what was a polite length of time to wait to call Scully at the hospital and say, “Hey, I had this crazy dream about miracles. Also, are you really alive?”  
  
If he’s honest, it started before that. In a house on the gentle slope of the Vineyard. If he’s honest, he hasn’t slept in years.  
  
It’s been months now. They are crawling, hands and knees, into an unforgiving little D.C. spring. All pink flowers and the bite of winter off the canal. He wears rings around his eyes like he is willfully married to the bleary, blank stares he directs at his ceilings between the hours of midnight and seven a.m. He is so tired that he is wide awake. On Tuesday, he’d finished a report in a record half an hour, looked up into Scully’s mild impressed face and promptly spilled his coffee all over the dotted line.  
  
And Scully. Scully is okay. Scully had been to Maine and to Texas and to the inside of a cyberpunk trailer. Scully had ordered topping heavy pizzas and called her mom and laughed at his jokes. Scully is okay. Scully is sleeping.  
  
Small favors and such. He wonders if she’s always just been able to pull down the shades and close her eyes.  
  
\--  
  
They drink coffee in yellow stained mugs as the sun pulls itself over the grey horizon. She orders a bowl of cereal and steals bacon off his plate without asking. He watches her without pretense because he is too tired to do anything else.  
  
Her hands, on the occasion that he has held them, are soft and cool where they should be calloused and hard from guns and autopsy incisions. Someday, when he is not gripping her fingers in a panic or trying to crush her hands in his so she has to stay on this earth to mend them, he will look at them more closely. Someday, he thinks he’ll try to read her palm and try to trace her lifeline and be utterly unable to divine her future.  
  
He tries to connect the black and white pattern on the table with a cracked red crayon, and she steals it from his hand while ordering another cup of coffee. He thinks she’s going to scold him for trying to demolish public property; instead, she smirks at him and draws a smiley face on her napkin.  
  
She steals from him when she can. Little things off his plate and from his hands, and larger things that he cannot name or place or point out, but which he’s sure are missing and which he is almost certain he could find tucked in her dresser drawer, buried in her coat pocket.  
  
Finders keepers, he thinks as she surreptitiously draws a hangman game on her paper placemat. He supposes they belong to her.  
  
\--  
  
She has begun to threaten him with melatonin and Melville. (He had tried, he’d told her once just for the sake of pissing her off, to get through the chapter on flukes four times with no success.) She withholds coffee and sips lattes while looking directly at him over office spreads of manila folders.  
  
She says, “The human body needs at least eight hours of sleep, Mulder.”  
  
He says, “Well, not all at one time.”  
  
\--  
  
He calls later that night. He is trying, he says over the phone, to set a world record.  
  
“For what?” she asks, her voice pulling in and out of focus as she juggles the phone and her car door. “Longest suspension time after falling asleep on the job because you haven’t slept in a week?”  
  
“Actually, if I was trying to set a world record for “longest” anything it would be - “  
  
She hangs up, and he laughs into the echoey dead-line silence.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, and she’s leaning on his door frame in jeans, shoving a pizza box into his hands. She likes to drive fast, like the tight D.C. side streets had wronged her some time ago. Road revenge. It makes her fast enough to always manage to be unexpected, even when he’s expecting her.  
  
“You’re not the usual delivery boy,” he notes as he sets it down on the table. She is kicking off her stacked boots, losing four inches and wrinkling her nose. “Miss me?”  
  
“Sorry to disappoint,” she says. “Not particularly.” She brushes past him to get plates from the middle shelf in his cabinet.  
  
He is pretty sure, not certain, but he’s known for his hunches, that the plates used to be on the top shelf, the one she can’t reach. They are mismatched, red and black, and heavy enough to bring her tired hands down below her waist as she sets them across from each other on the wooden table. He thinks he’s spent half his time across from her at tables, like they are always playing cards or boardless Battleship. It’s an ongoing question of who is winning. Who is up a point or two today. He reaches across the table to swipe at the corner of her mouth with a napkin, and she smiles.  
  
Draw, he thinks. Tonight, it’s a draw.  
  
\--  
  
Before midnight, she stands and stretches her arms up far beyond her height. She yawns, and he knows if he shifts just enough on the couch, just far enough to leave her the singular area between the softest pillow and the end of the right cushion, she’ll sleep against the leather until three. He sits still. She blinks at him through dark lashes and says, “Walk me to my car?”  
  
He stands without thinking. The scoreboard clicks and clacks. Scully one, Mulder zero.  
  
In the hallway, he fumbles with his keys and fucks up the deadbolt when she lays her hand high on his shoulder. She says, “You need sleep tonight, Mulder.”  
  
Her hand is not uncomfortably cold against his back. Somewhere, buried fathoms deep under layers of eidetic memory, he has a foothold on a feeling. Feverish in Scully’s bed, the dry heat of a desert summer and one of her soft, indulgent white hand towels against his forehead with a coldness that was blessedly sharp, that pierced some hazy fog. Her hands on his cheeks then, on his back now, feel the same.  
  
He says, “Scully, haven’t you ever heard the phrase I’ll sleep when I’m dead?”  
  
She raises an eyebrow as he locks the door. He doesn’t see it, but he’s been at this a while. Never let it be said he wasn’t a quick learner.  
  
“Are you eager to meet your maker, Mulder?”  
  
“Not particularly.” He shrugs. “He’s probably not super happy with me.”  
  
She bumps him with enough well-planned carelessness to make it seem like an accident. Playing at distraction in the curve of her nails. Her cross sparks in the hallway light.  
  
“Slow down,” she says as they move towards the elevators. It’s a careless little directive born of long years spent as the shortest and bossiest of a bunch of boisterous children. She touches his arm when she says it. “Where do you think you’re going without me?”  
  
\--  
  
Her car is parked just outside, almost perfectly perpendicular to the building's stairs. Her eyes flicker over it, and she walks far down the sidewalk. The night air is good for you, she says. You’ll sleep better if you walk a bit. It’s not a question or invitation. She doesn’t look behind her as he catches up.  
  
They walk in colder air, tracing a trail of breadcrumbs, sunflower seed shells, twice around his block. She misses her dog. Misses having a reason to walk the Georgetown side streets at night.  
  
He says, “Is this not a reason?”  
  
In fact, this might be the first thing he can really remember her doing entirely without a reason. She’d looked at her car like it was out of place in his neighborhood each time they’d passed.  
  
She says, “We’re not in Georgetown.” Her eyes narrow as she looks at him, her lips curving up in anticipation of her own amusement at whatever she’s going to say next. She rarely does anything before mulling it over, looking is situated firmly, at least several pages, before leaping in whatever book she bases her life on. “You make an okay replacement though,” she says. She means for the dog.  
  
He says, “Thank you. I’m even house trained.” Very seriously. Just to make her laugh before she can think about it.  
  
The air is turning her nose red and tugging at the tips of his fingers until they’re tingling and numb. “What else do you miss?” he asks.  
  
She does him the favor of not acting like she doesn’t know what he means. Instead, she smiles uncomfortably at the air in front of them, shakes her head. “Mulder.”  
  
He’s an idiot. He shouldn’t talk when he’s this tired. He tries to determine if he should apologize out loud. He could touch her elbow, just above the sharpest part, and she’d probably know what he meant. Lack of sleep is making the vision at the corner of his eyes blur, but he could still see the tightness in her shoulders. He reaches out.  
  
“I think I miss California.”  
  
It takes him a beat too long to realize that she’s talking, and to him (to him!) of all people. He’s momentarily incapacitated by the realization that Scully, Scully who is so relentlessly intelligent and quietly brave, is speaking to him. That sometimes, fuck it - often, when she opened her mouth to talk, to force thought into the half-corporal body of sound, she directed it towards him. He’s dizzy with lack of sleep. He angles himself towards her as they walk like his whole body could listen.  
  
She blows out a breath and it is shimmery in the cold. “No, I don’t know. Not California, exactly. Not now.” She flicks her eyes towards him to pretend she doesn’t remember San Diego. “Too much sun.”  
  
A Scully grown in California is unfathomable. He can’t picture it. He only wants to picture it. He wants to book two tickets and plant her in the sand like an ocean relic, brine and bone, to be sifted and softened and dug up later.  
  
“But I miss the ocean,” she goes on. “The sound of it. How big it is. When I was little, my dad used to tell us that you can never really grow up when you live near the ocean. Because no matter how big you get, it’s always going to be bigger. ” She smiles, twitch of the lips. “Maybe that’s why I moved to a different coast.”  
  
He hums his acknowledgment. He wonders if she would have wanted to raise Emily near warmer waters. Keep her small and strong. It doesn’t matter now. But because he is selfish and has been fighting off the urge to permanently ground her within his reach for years now, he says, “You didn’t leave it though. Oceans are oceans.” He shrugs. “Isn’t all water the same?”  
  
Scully tilts her head toward him so her jaw looks sharp in the light. If he could picture a Scully California born, he would be able to picture Melissa laughing, mouth open to catch the sea air, at the apex of the sand and Pacific sea. He squints and tries, but his eyes keep slipping open to watch her watch him.  
  
“No,” she says simply. “It’s not.”  
  
\--  
  
Third time around the block, and she’s drawing some incomprehensible shape in the air in front of them with her hands. He blinks at it.  
  
“What the hell is that, Scully, a double helix?”  
  
The air freezes her laughter as it passes her lips. “No, it’s the spiral staircase that was in that one base house. If you can’t picture it, you’re never going to understand how I managed to break both my ankle and Charlie’s arm coming down it.”  
  
California had cracked something in her wide open. San Andres Fault line in Scully form. She missed the ocean, she missed Ahab. Charlie was a doll and she bullied him. Bill was a born soldier and he bullied her. She really, really missed her dog.  
  
He pretends to examine her invisible staircase. He says, “No wonder Melissa was the one who wanted to be an artist.”  
  
Scully’s mouth falters around whatever she was about to say next. A full block, and she hadn’t said her sister’s name. He touches her above the sharpest part of her elbow.  
  
Gently, he says, “You really remember being a kid?”  
  
“Yes.” She squints. Every other streetlight glances against her hair in a cold halo. Her nose is red. “Don’t you?”  
  
“Yes.” He shrugs as he smiles. “Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one.”  
  
There is no excuse for it. Childhood or the lasting imprint thereof. It’s one of the things he wishes he could apologize for, but he doesn’t he think could fit the scope between his teeth. He touches her in the same place as before, through her black coat.  
  
She reaches for his hand and tucks it into her pocket. “Mulder, if you don’t start wearing gloves I’m going to have to start putting hand warmers in here.”  
  
He wants to ask what else she’s holding for him, deep in the lining of her dark coat pockets, but a streetlight catches her just-so again, and he feels like maybe he is not supposed to know.  
  
\--  
  
That night, after she’s slipped out to make her tidy way home, he almost sleeps long enough to see a dream through until the end.  
  
Scully’s hands on his cheeks, chest. Scully’s hands in deep black pockets. Scully showing something to him, palms cupped together to make a basket like that of reeds or of ribs. Scully’s hands in deep, dark water and pulling up, up. Her fingers around Melissa’s thin wrist or Emily’s fingers. Samantha’s white upper arm. Scully’s hands holding one or both or somehow all. Scully’s hands.  
  
He knows when he wakes up that it wasn’t a nightmare.  
  
\--  
The second night he opens the door before she knocks. Off her look he says, “Insomniac’s intuition.” She crosses the threshold by ducking under his arm.  
  
Tonight she’s brought chamomile and Honeycrisp apples and gentle exasperation. He tries to cajole her towards the door - the night air is decidedly less chilly than whatever cold had shaken something loose in her last night, but three more turns around the block and he thinks she might finally reveal to him the secrets of the universe. She shakes her head, pushing him down against the couch and disappearing into the kitchen. He wonders where she’s decided to start keeping his mugs. The reedy sound of ceramic on ceramic reminds him of wind chimes.  
  
He sprawls out on his couch like he is alone.  
  
“Are we sleeping together now, Scully?”  
  
They have been, he supposes, in layman’s terms, for quite some time. But they are both overeducated and underpaid. Scully’s been falling asleep on him since Oregon. Her glasses crooked on her face as they rocked down a highway. Her serious, over-sized blazer had crept up around her wrist and waist, revealing pale skin and a paler blouse. White on white on. Occasionally, not when he’s driving, he matches her breath for breath. Closes his eyes. So. They are, have been, in the most elementary of ways, sleeping together. Run and tell that at the water cooler.  
  
“Are you asleep?”  
  
The steam from the tea obscures her face as she comes into the room.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Then you’ve answered your own question.”  
  
The layman has never been much of a romantic.  
  
\--  
  
The light from his fish tank is blue. The light from the TV is orange-red. Still, there is a sufficient lack of illumination to call what they are doing sitting in the dark, which is preferable. It’s easier to explain why she is sprawled out on his floor, back against his couch, toes pointed towards the coffee table, if they can claim obfuscation under cover of darkness.  
  
She moves her hands in the muddled light, looking towards the silent TV screen. He’s stretched out on the couch. An ungracious host. She’d been out the door and down the hall before returning for her cell phone. The tea was made and the apples sliced delicately on his coffee table with autopsy grace. But somehow she is sitting on his floor, phone in pocket, the top of her head turned golden in the half-light and close enough to touch. Obfuscation. Cover of darkness.  
  
He says, “You know what they say about doctors and apples, Scully.”  
  
She rolls her ankle in a lazy half-circle against his floor. She’s wearing white ankle socks with jeans that he’s never seen before. She says, “Do you want me to leave?”  
  
He doesn’t. He never has. He says, “Don’t you need to get to bed?”  
  
The clock in the corner, half-facing an overdue library edition of some H.P. Lovecraft knock off, reads 11:21. It’s early yet, but her breathing is slow and even.  
  
“Insomniacs aren’t born,” she quips back. “They’re made.”  
  
On the screen is a re-run of _M*A*S*H_ , just images over the static hum of the boxy television. Flashes of a woman in a white wedding dress, covered in blood. He remembers the first time he saw this episode; early into his first cold London winter, with Phoebe peering over his shoulder, moving for his attention.  
  
“I remember this episode,” Scully says. Sometimes he wishes she believed in telepathy just so he could offer proof of whatever uncanny thing had thrummed between them since her heels first hit his basement floor.  
  
“What was it about again?”  
  
He likes to hear her explain unnecessary and already familiar things.  
  
She leans back against the couch until her hair brushes against his arm. “They’re all having nightmares because of how long they’ve had to work triage for a few days. It’s all very surreal. No one is getting enough sleep.”  
  
“Mm. Subliminal messages?”  
  
She smiles and it cuts against the dark. “TV Guide always has had your number.”  
  
The screen flickers. Scully breathes in deep. She says, quiet, “I remember because this episode always used to scare Melissa.”  
  
It feels unexpectedly open and shut, although something makes him feel like she’s been meaning to talk about Melissa since San Diego. Since long before that. Since hospital rooms and cold backed plastic chairs. There was never, even in the long pauses that felt like peace, enough time.  
  
Scully shifts so her head is off the couch. She rubs at her temple with one hand. The distance between them is negligible but larger than before. She built walls and he dug ditches. They were both good at using the space they were given.  
  
The screen cuts unexpectedly to a commercial. He reaches around near his thigh and turns it off. It’s dark with some weight now, some seriousness. Dark beyond obfuscation and verging into strange territory. They were always most comfortable in spaces others would find ill-fitting or absurd. Sitting in darkness not talking was no one’s idea of normal. But he’d turned off the television so she didn’t feel like she was only able to talk in between the drama of the television show. So that there were no bookends. Enough time.  
  
He hears her breathe. “You know we used to share a bed?”  
  
He hadn’t. He stays quiet. She can feel him listening, she always can.  
  
“She would talk non-stop. All the time. It didn’t matter if we’d spent the day together or hadn’t seen each other for weeks at summer camp. She always had something to say.” Her fingers still move against her temple, but her breathing is even and relaxed, like in sleep. She almost laughs. “That’s why, Mulder. That’s why I can sleep so well. She’d tell me things and I’d just -” She gestures in front of her face. “I’d just close my eyes.”  
  
He’s suddenly nervous. They never, ever do this. Other people dance around politics and religion. They side-step ghosts. It is not polite to bring up your dead/missing/dead/gone sisters and daughters at dinner parties or over coffee. There was something strange about once being younger. It was simple: They were both children once, but they’d never tell.  
  
He says, “Yeah?”  
  
She nods, breathes in deep like it’s tumbling up her ribs. She says, “God, Emily looked so much like her.”  
  
She says, “We used to fight over blankets. She’d wake me up at midnight, kicking. She always said it’s because she dreamt like a dog, like she was always running.”  
  
She says, “Melissa had the sharpest elbows.”  
  
The Ss in Melissa’s name catch at her teeth like the hiss before a secret. She’s smiling. They never, ever do this. He catches her hand in mid air, an invitation for entropy. For not being fully grown and for maybe never having been that way.  
  
He closes his eyes. He says, “Samantha had the knobbiest knees.”  
  
\--  
  
She shows up at his apartment empty handed. It has gotten too warm for the long black coat with the deep pockets, and she stands with her cold hands clasped in front of her jeans.  
  
She shows up at his apartment empty handed at three o’clock in the morning. When he opens the door, she shakes her head and says, “I knew you’d be awake.” Her eyes are bright and clear. She seems fundamentally un-disappointed.  
  
She shows up at his apartment empty handed at three o’clock in the morning, and when he lets her in the door she closes it behind her so it clicks. He almost asks what she’s doing, Scully who could always close her eyes. Almost asks if she’s gone and turned somnambulist on him, but if she has, he thinks they say you’re not supposed to wake them.  
  
She shows up at his apartment empty handed and the door clicks shut behind her and he doesn’t ask her anything and suddenly, terrifyingly, she reaches up and kisses him. Really kisses him. Wide awake and decidedly not dying. Just once. They both know this is never going to happen again.  
  
Her mouth tastes like toothpaste, and he brings his hands fluttering down to her waist expecting the dark thick wool of the long black coat and finds the cool skin of her waist where her blue sweater is inching up. White on white. He feels like he had as a kid, his palms against the cold glass window panes while a lightning storm crackled across the sound. Feeling the latent vibrations all the way up to his cheeks.  
  
“Sorry.” She pulls back. She does not look it. She glances up and smiles right into him, tilted and sudden so that it catches him right below the collar, where he least expects it. She shrugs.  
  
She says, “I couldn’t sleep.”  
  
\-- 

gn. 


End file.
